Recently I acquired some 1st generation VHS that belonged to a friend mine who has passed. These are episodes of the Cher Show (solo) that re-aired on VH1 in 1998/1999. This series has never been on DVD and any advice on cleaning it up would surely be appreciated. I'm fairly familiar with VirtualDub and I'm becoming more familiar with avisynth using avspmod. Thanks

I think the herringbone was in the original signal. The angular hash/checkerboarding is poor capture/chroma decoding, the comb filter should be low-pass filtering the chroma so that it doesn't look like a sine wave.

I think the heringbone effect you're seeing must be coming into play in the capture somewhere? What would cause this. I don't think I've ever noticed it in my captures before. I'm playing through a Sony VCR and am passing through my Panasonic DVD-R (which I believe one of y'all here told me has a built in TBC on Line 1) and out the S-Video to VC500. I can definitely try to recapture with the blacks better. I thought I had the histogram going the whole time & it wasn't going into the red at all but I could be wrong. Maybe even settings in the Panasonic that need to be tweaked. I dunno.

ok i'll try another capture and report back. What's funny is some of the other episodes taped from VH1 do not have the "herringbone" distortion. Maybe it was just a bad connection that day I dunno or maybe it's something on my end. I'll tinker around to be sure.

Herringbone pattern is apparent - flaws inherent from VHS source and capture, or maybe analog cable (as mentioned) and some crosstalk on those reds and pinks (also as mentioned).

Looks like a job for a couple of resizes (down to 360x480 with precise bilinear then back up to 720x480 with lanczos to eliminate the crosstalk) and a strong dose of Neat Video with the temporal filter for that wavy noise.

Not perfect but, for it being the middle of the night here, it will do.

Source:

Processed:

Originally Posted by happycube

Using a VCR with S-Video output, or a running the composite through a better comb filter could help the checkerboarding.

Are you suggesting a hardware solution? If so, what would you recommend?

A bit, but I'm being subjective. Blacks look nicer, and a few less artifacts. (Maybe less sharpening on this capture?) I believe Sanlyn would have better input on this.

As for post processing, it's not really going to be easier or more difficult. It still has those herringbone and dot crawl artifacts. As well, don't worry too much about the coloring. As long as you don't oversaturate to clipped levels, or underdo it to near zero chroma it can always be corrected with the wide variety of color filters available, for VirtualDub and Avisynth.

Having said that, it goes without saying that removing as many of the artifacts at the capture level as you can is ideal, but it's also quite normal to believe that every VHS capture will have its issues and need processing regardless.

It's just the nature of the beast when dealing with an analog format being converted to digital.

That is true. Sanlyn just suggested I try a second capture with darker blacks. I think the few less artifacts may come from the Line in NR being turned on. I'm open to suggestions as to whether we like this or not lol

First try and a quickie. Still has a long way to go but I ran short of time. Some of the herringbone is still there. I doubt you'll get rid of it completely without ruining everything. Others can have a field day playing with it. Will have to fix this in 3 steps. Maybe 4. Maybe 5. Had to go to 16-bit plugins to prevent banding. Maybe you could get a better capture ? ? ? Looks over filtered right now, especially in MPC-BE player. I'll have to work on that.

What happened to the audio? Kinda tinny, even for VHS.

ED: OK. Re-posted.

Later.

Not sure what could be wrong with the audio. It's being fed into my Kenwood VR209 and passed through the cassette deck for attenuation and out to my E-MU 0202 USB for capture. I didn't think it sounded too shoddy. It is mono.

If the highlights being burned would be relative to the contrast right? I monitored the histogram the whole time while recording this clip & didn't see the right side (highlights) go into the red at all. *scratches head*

Edit: nevermind I see where you say that lowering the black some more with fix this. I'll try again

Not sure what could be wrong with the audio. It's being fed into my Kenwood VR209 and passed through the cassette deck for attenuation and out to my E-MU 0202 USB for capture. I didn't think it sounded too shoddy. It is mono.

What you can try is capturing through your soundcard instead. VirtualDub allows this in the audio menu settings. Yeah, I know that such units, like the 0202, are meant to improve things, and I thought so myself when using Behringer mixers, etc. But they can be overkill for baseband VHS audio, and some tapes just sound so much better without them. A simple onboard soundcard, using 48k/16bit/stereo, is good enough for VHS audio.

Originally Posted by Cherbette

I found this filter which seems to be what we may need but it may as well be written in Japanese. Figuring the parameters sounds like some technical math involved lol

Looks promising and worth a try. I wonder how it will do on dropouts, which seems to be one of the bigger challenges in restoration.

Originally Posted by sanlyn

I think the main purpose of the exercise is to see if a poor connection might have caused the big problem, or if that stripey junk is really on the original source. I do have a couple of old VHS cable recordings where the damn cable station had similar Fm "hash" (crosshatching) in the signal. Cleaning it 100% produced an unwatchable video. I got rid of a lot of it, and just live with the rest.

This is quite challenging to determine, especially if the original recorder is no longer with us, but I see your point if it benefits at the capture level.

Some of the grain is too fine to be part of the source, but the wavy lines issue can be either way. But it makes little difference in post processing if you can not determine the root cause to solve it earlier in the workflow.

And yes, post processing is, in many ways, a path of compromise, especially when it comes to VHS video. The problem with VHS video, and capturing it - unlike, for example, DV tape - is that it was never designed for the digital age. I've accepted that, therefore I captureth and restoreth as bestest possible and moveth on...